Why Is Santa’s Suit Red?

I

t started out green in the earliest of the legends and folklore with characters
known as "gift-givers". Whether the giver was from Norway or Germany or elsewhere,
he was depicted as wearing some sort of green coat. Perhaps, because the gift-giver
appeared in winter in locations apt to be snow-covered on his arrival, the green
color was representative of a promise for green plants to return. At least he stood
out against the snow almost as much as if he were in red.

Occasionally the gift-giver was attired in a red bishop’s robe (St. Nicholas was
a bishop after all), but that was a limited, rare engagement.

The change from green to red occurred, not when Clement Clarke Moore published his
A Visit from St. Nicholas ("he was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot" with no color mentioned),
but from an illustration in Puck, the humor magazine, in the early 1900s. This was
followed by a soft drink company, whose colors were red and white, and that "borrowed"
Santa around 1916 to push their mineral water and later in the 1920s to sell ginger
ale. Obviously, this effort by the White Rock Beverage Company (which by now is
better known for its portrayal of Psyche perched on a rock and looking at her reflection
in a pond) all preceded Coca Cola’s hiring Haddon Sundblom in the 1930s to come
up with our definitive vision of Santa as a Coke drinking, red-suited, larger-than-life
and very jolly Coke salesman.